I'd had my eye on Miles and Coltrane Blue (.) for a while. The other night was their last show so after band practice it was then or never.

(What's that dot in brackets for?  Who knows.)

Sadly I was a bit disappointed.  The music was fine but the story they wove around it was pretty weak.  Everybody did well what they were called upon to do but they were not called upon to do much of interest.

I didn't recognize any of the music and this chap has probably hit the reason on the head.  He has more nice things to say about the show than I have but hey, the end of the show was fun.

This was the last of 24 consecutive performances and boy were these guys pleased and ready for their flight back to North Carolina in the morning.  They fooled around singing and dancing as they dismantled what there was of a set. Even their techie got into the act, deserting his post in the box to deliver a poetry and dance routine.

You'd be well and truly knackered if you did 24 consecutive performances of the RSNO's City Noir concert.  That piece in particular has one of the most energetic climaxes you could hope to hear but the rest of the second part of the concert was equally rumbustious with Christopher Rouse's The Infernal Machine ("this energetic whirlwind leaves the listener breathless at the end of its five minutes" according to one programme note that I reproduce by kind permission of the composer) and the world premiere of Festival City by Tod Machover.

The latter, commissioned by the EIF, is made up of sounds of Edinburgh submitted by anyone who cared to, snippets of some of the many pieces that have been played at the Festival since its inception, new music by Machover inspired by the sights and sounds of the city and contributions from a small number of RSNO players who devised ways of using their instruments to imitate natural sounds.

All of that was shaken and stirred to produce an absolutely fascinating listen.  I was lucky enough to hear it twice since there was a short afternoon session describing how the piece was created with examples showing how the raw sound was manipulated and layered with music.  The session ended with a performance of the entire work.

By comparison the first half of the concert could be regarded as tame, but playing the overture from Verdi's La Forza del Destino and Bruch's Violin Concerto would still help you work up a good sweat.